Latest news with #Borderlands3
Forbes
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Gearbox's Randy Pitchford Responds To ‘Borderlands 4' Price Debacle
Borderlands 4 Gearbox Gearbox CEO Randy Pitchford went extremely viral yesterday after a week-old tweet was passed around responding to a fan comment about a potential $80 price for Borderlands 4: 'A) Not my call. B) If you're a real fan, you'll find a way to make it happen. My local game store had Starflight for Sega Genesis for $80 in 1991 when I was just out of high school working minimum wage at an ice cream parlor in Pismo Beach and I found a way to make it happen.' The tweet inspired hundreds if not thousands of takes about its tone-deafness, plus gaming outlet coverage far and wide. It comes at a time when consumer spending power is dropping and prices are going up, and telling people if they're a 'real fan' they can make an $80 price work did not go over well, to say the least. Many fans said the tweet had derailed promotion for the game out in four months, others said they wouldn't play at all now. I find this at least…somewhat dramatic, and I have my doubts a tweet is going to significantly affect Bordlerands 4 sales this fall. But that price might. Today, Pitchford addressed the tweet by posting an older clip where he was asked about a potential price. It's a much more nuanced take on the issue, though it certainly seems to indicate that $80 is in the cards. Though this time, he says things like how he wants to create a value that fans will be happy with at any price, and addresses the plain fact that the production cost of Borderlands 4 is double that of Borderlands 3. I am no stranger to off-putting tweets from Pitchford as I've had some dust-ups myself. But a poorly-put tweet does in fact represent a larger reality (as explained in this video) about ballooning video game costs, which is true. I remember when it was revealed that Insomniac's Spider-Man 2 had triple the budget of the first game despite using a barely larger version of the same city and a second hero that had already been created for a spin-off. This is certainly not to say that $80 is the right call. Consumer only just got used to the $70 increase from $60 a few years ago, and now this leap to $80, spearheaded by Nintendo and its Mario Kart World pricing, is irritating and exhausting when 4-5 games will now be the cost of an entire console by themselves. This is what's going to happen, however. The dam has broken. In a year and a half at most, you are going to see practically all AAA games priced at $80. There is fan theorizing about Borderlands 4 publisher Take Two trying to push that even further for the release of GTA 6, the biggest game of all time, seeing if they could get to $100 or more. However, this leaves room for smaller games and smaller studios to shine. The highest rated games of the year are $50 or under, including GOTY frontrunner Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 along with Blue Prince and Split/Fiction. So that's an opportunity there. It's a bad tweet. It also reflects an unfortunate reality that's coming no matter what. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Borderlands 3 player beats every last bit of the FPS at the highest difficulty, without getting downed a single time: "The most tense run I've done"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. A Borderlands 3 player has completed the entire game at the hardest difficulty, without getting downed a single time. In the Borderlands games, running out of health drops you to the ground, but it doesn't immediately kill you. Instead, it challenges you to 'fight for your life' - if you can get a kill while downed, you'll immediately be resurrected to fight another day (allies can also resurrect you during FFYL). For streamer LazyData, however, that was never on the table. Running an entire playthrough of Borderlands 3 - including all DLC and the complete endgame - they made their way through the game without ever entering FFYL, aside from in one scripted moment that's hard-coded into the game and can't be avoided. Making their achievement even more impressive was the fact that they completed their challenge in Mayhem Mode, massively increasing enemy health pools and adding various extra modifiers. Mayhem Mode runs from level 1 to level 10, so naturally LazyData was making the challenge as hard as possible. Much of their run was played out using their patented 'Hellzerker' build for Amara, which focuses on rapidly clearing out enemies and staying as mobile as possible. Even more impressive is the fact that there's not much healing in the kit, and what's available requires you to be playing as aggressively as possible. That's all well and good for a Borderlands game generally, but it's probably a little more nerve-wracking when a single big hit can end an entire run. Gearbox boss Randy Pitchford says "F balance" for Borderlands 4, before affirming that weapons and skills will get nerfs if they need them.
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Steam users are review bombing the Borderlands games following Take-Two's new user agreement: "I don't feel comfortable with the terms of service"
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Ahead of Borderlands 4, fans of the action RPG series from Gearbox Software are rallying online to share their thoughts on Take-Two Interactive's new terms of service. As pointed out by a player in a recent Reddit thread, the Borderlands games are currently facing a review bomb of sorts on Steam. The debacle boils down to Take-Two's recently updated user agreement, which is outlined on the holding company's website. "People are review bombing the entire Borderlands series because of EULA changes that can apparently gain root-level access to your machine under the guise of 'anti-cheat' software." The poster continues, explaining how fans are upset at the prospect of Take-Two collecting "personal info like accounts, passwords, telephone numbers, etc." One look at the Steam pages for each of the three main Borderlands entries serves as proof that players are indeed upset about the new terms of service. Under the first game's recent reviews, which have dropped to "Mixed," people share their concerns about the user agreement. People are review-bombing the Borderlands games because Gearbox/2K made EULA changes? from r/borderlands3 "I don't feel comfortable with the terms of service," writes one such fan. Another simply calls the game "spyware" following the integration of Take-Two's new terms of service. The page for Borderlands 2 also shows "Mixed" reviews, with players highlighting their worries over the user agreement and how they're afraid it affects their privacy online: "This collects usernames and passwords, IP locations and browser history data." Recent Borderlands 3 reviews don't look much better, either. One fan exclaims that "recent EULA changes seem insane," while others describe how now "mods are a bannable offense" and any "display of cheats/exploits is bannable" despite the game being largely single-player/co-op rather than an online experience where anti-cheat measures make sense. Elsewhere, people cite the legal implications of Take-Two's new user agreement. Not everyone is convinced the changes spell the end of Borderlands as fans know and love it, however. As seen on the Reddit post covering the review bombing, some think players are "overreacting" currently: "People are overreacting for sure. The EULA is hardly any different than the one before it all the way back in 2018." Just as the games' reviews are now "Mixed" on Steam, then, so are the community's opinions on the terms of service. Borderlands 3 player beats every last bit of the FPS at the highest difficulty, without getting downed a single time: "The most tense run I've done"
Forbes
08-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
How Video Game Exploits Predicted ChatGPT College Cheating
Borderlands 3 There is currently a somewhat horrifying article going around from NY Magazine about how widespread cheating is in college, no longer through sneaking in answers to tests or having someone else write your essay. Well, there is someone else writing your essay, or rather, some thing. That would be ChatGPT, the ubiquitous AI system that can take any prompt and spit out a convincing-sounding paper. This has spread everywhere from high school to the Ivy League, and teachers are drowning in AI-generated papers where it's often impossible to prove their authenticity, so many are just giving up. Here's a sampling from the piece of the thought process of the students doing: The thing is, video games have predicted this exact same concept for years. One that's more demonstrable in the industry than other comparable examples of societal laziness. Rather, ChatGPT is more akin to an exploit, to an overpowered build in a game. In the dozens and dozens of games I've played over the years, there is one universal truth. If there is a shortcut to beating a game or doing an insane amount of damage or anything that's able to be utilized for an easy path through a game's challenges, it will be used. By bad players, by good players, if it exists, it's a tool that will be exploited until developers take note and nerf its power or remove it from the game entirely, patching the game, fixing a bug. FEATURED | Frase ByForbes™ Unscramble The Anagram To Reveal The Phrase Pinpoint By Linkedin Guess The Category Queens By Linkedin Crown Each Region Crossclimb By Linkedin Unlock A Trivia Ladder Damage Players will chose this path almost every time. Those who don't use it may be in it for 'the love of the game,' but this requires purposeful handicapping to create some semblance of a challenge. But the overpowered build or skill or skip is so tempting that it is often impossible to resist for the vast majority of players. This is ChatGPT, a bug, an exploit in the education system that students will now have to purposefully avoid using in order to have some semblance of challenge and friction in their education. Many students, having been pressured their entire life to get good grades and study and research for difficult tests and lengthy papers now suddenly have a button to skip all that. Quite literally, a button. And when you're 14-22, you're not exactly thinking about the long-term benefits of actually getting an education instead of coasting your way to whatever degree you're seeking. If you think that this cannot be true for more hyper-specialized fields like law or medicine, I have bad news about what many lawyers are now using to write legal opinions and doctors are relying on to come up with diagnoses. The problem here is…there is no patch. No fixing this bug. Students don't want it fixed, OpenAI and other tech giants throwing billions into AI tech don't want it fixed, and at this point there is no actual means of stopping this. Any possible legislation is seemingly ages away, as if Congress ever does a coherent job of policing big tech in the first place. The tools to find AI-generated content are not remotely on par with the ability to generate the AI content, which is getting more complex and harder to spot by the day. The teachers and professors here are being thrust into an impossible situation. They're sometimes even going back to the stone age of oral reports and pencil-written essays, with little other choice. A laptop keyboard and ChatGPT on AppStore displayed on a phone screen are seen in this illustration ... More photo taken in Krakow, Poland on June 8, 2023. (Photo by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images) The video game industry has this handled. There will always be bugs, exploits, cheats or simply overpowered options to reduce the challenge in any game. But it's whack-a-mole. A problem exists for a while, it's found and fixed, another one crops up later. ChatGPT is not a mole. ChatGPT is a Balrog emerging from a pit with no Gandalf to stand in its way. Appealing to the moral nature of good sportsmanship and ethics will not work here on the vast majority of students. They want to have fun in college, they want to graduate with the degree they're paying potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars for, and they do not want any of that at risk because of pesky classwork or difficult tests. And there is no end in sight for this. No patch is coming. Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, Bluesky and Instagram. Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Business Mayor
07-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Business Mayor
Is Borderlands 4 cross-platform?
There are only a handful of games we can confidently say are even close to being as fun to play in co-op as the Borderlands games. Some like Split Fiction come to mind, but there's something special about getting your pals together and running around Pandora as your favorite Vault Hunters. Borderlands 4 is the newest entry in the franchise that began in 2009, and the big question isn't about the story, the guns, or the characters, but cross-platform support. Normally, we would just assume this game would have it, but Borderlands 3 didn't launch with any cross-platform support and only got it after several updates. We traveled to Pandora and back to bring you the definitive answer on whether Borderlands 4 is cross-platform or not. 2K Games Yes, Gearbox has finally learned its lesson and Borderlands 4 will launch with full cross-platform support. During the official gameplay deep dive, Gearbox Entertainment officially confirmed that Borderlands 4 will allow players on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC to team up in this epic looter shooter adventure, stating, 'Thanks to our improved lobby system, it's easier than ever to join up with your friends on the fly. And with full cross-play at launch, you can play with your friends on any platform.' Not only that, but Borderlands 4 will also support crossplay on the Nintendo Switch 2. The game will still have the option for two people to play together in local split-screen co-op, but online crossplay will allow you to form a full team of four vault hunters. While there has been no word specifically on cross-progression, we suspect it is going to be included as well. That feature never made it to the past game, and Gearbox must be aware of how much we and the rest of the community want the ability to take our character from one platform to the next without having to start from scratch. Once we know for sure one way or the other on cross-progression, we will keep you and this article updated.
